Mashing

This is a critical step in creating Anohka’s distinct flavour profile. We are the first and only distillery in Canada to use a Meura Mash Filter.

Why?

We did not take this decision lightly but came to it almost naturally, as it was our only choice to achieve our goals of creating flavour intensity, while also doing it in the most sustainable way possible.

The two goals seem antithetical but are in fact linked. Having a Meura Mash Filter allows us to extract more flavour and more sugar from our grains, while reducing our water and energy consumption by up to 30% versus typical mash and lauter systems.

How

Unlike traditional malt distilleries we create our grist using a hammer mill which pulverizes the grain into much smaller particles than a traditional roller mill. This smaller particle size results in faster conversion of starch to sugar and enhanced extraction of flavour from the grain.

After it is milled, the grain flour is augered into the our mash vessel where it is mixed with warm water to activate the enzymes in our malt to break down protein and starches in the grain to create the nutrients we need to feed our specifically chosen yeast strain.

We then pump our mash into the mash filter where, instead of slowly gravity draining the liquid off the grain we can separate the grain from the liquid using a specially designed filter membrane and an airbladder to squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the grain.

There are other groundbreaking distilleries such as InchDairnie and Waterford who also employ a Meura Mash Filter, but we set our selves apart by pushing our Mash Filter to it’s absolute limit and beyond what should be theoretically possible. We use far less water during both mashing and sparging but still achieve nearly 100% extraction efficiency from our grain.

By using such little water we are able to achieve an impossibly high initial gravity of 1.080, which results in a concentration of flavour not typically seen in the industry. This high sugar and flavour concentration creates the perfect starting point for our fermentation and is critical to Anohka’s distillery character.